With Halloween Around the Corner, Super Computers are getting "Brainy"

Just when you thought supercomputer technology yielded the optimum performance, a new project arises that is literally mind blowing. An article by CNN highlights the Human Brain Project, a billion-dollar plan to replicate the human brain inside a supercomputer.

What sounds like a science-fiction movie coming true, is actually a project geared toward curing conditions like depression, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's. This project may change the methods of medical imaging for those conditions because it attempts to simulate the tangles of neurons and synapses that power high-functioning thoughts, like moving and reasoning.

The Human Brain Project is piggy-backing off a project in Switzerland that studied tiny slivers of rodent gray matter and fed a computer with huge amounts of data and algorithms. Now that breakthroughs have been made in predicting thought, there is a need for more funding and supercomputers to expand the project.

The bold claims of the project have dubbed the scientists as "Team Frankenstein" and their computer as "Skynet," the artificial intelligence that unleashed a robot war upon Earth in the "Terminator" films.

Sean Hill, the neuroscientist on the project laughs at the comparisons and says that the supercomputer will mostly be used for educational purposes and it will allow scientists to conduct experiments without the need of probing in human skulls.

To read more about the project, check out the CNN article here.

A Supercomputing Revolution may make Star Trek's Warp Drive Possible

For all you Captain Kirk and supercharged workstation fans out there, moving faster than the speed of light may become a reality. The idea is related to the theory that the fabric of space (called space-time), can be manipulated to permit objects to move faster than photons of light.

Harold White, a NASA scientist believes he has created a feasible model for a warp drive. Piggy-backing off of the original model by Alcubierre, which consisted of a football-shaped craft attached to a ring that would constantly revolve around it. The ring would be made of some kind of exotic matter that would cause space-time to warp into a bubble. This bubble theoretically allows for the spaceship's engine to compress the space ahead of it and expand the space behind it. The ship would essentially move to another place without actually moving, pushing the space behind it. The problem with the old theory is that the mass-energy of Jupiter would be the amount needed to create the bubble.

 
White has transformed the original theory by suggesting the ring be more of a donut shape than flat. He has additionally suggested that "the intensity of the space warps can be oscillated over time," which would reduce the required energy for the craft. White and his team have been doing "tabletop experiments" using a "laser interferometer," essentially making mini-space-time warps.
If technology runs with this theory, Earthlings could potentially visit other stars on a craft about the size of the Voyager from 1977 and travel at 10 times the speed of light.  Can you imagine the speed of the high performance server on that craft?

To read the source for this post click here.

PSSC Labs To Supply new supercomputer for HPCC at WKU

March 9, 2010 | PSSC Labs announced that it has received the contract to supply a new multi-technology supercomputer for the High Performance Computing Center (HPCC) at WKU. Western Kentucky University's Ogden College of Science and Engineering with the help of Senator Mitch McConnell secured $2.5 million funding from the U.S. Department of Education on October 1, 2009.

The PSSC Labs supercomputer will be an ultra high performance system with over 7500 CPU cores, 4100 GPU cores, high volume data storage, and high speed network connectivity. The HPCC will provide cyber infrastructure required to support research across academic disciplines at WKU, and will expand capacity to create strategic partnerships between university faculty and global business industry.

Almost forty suppliers competed for this contract, including Dell, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Cisco. PSSC Labs was chosen to provide the supercomputer because of its outstanding reputation in the High Performance Computing (HPC) industry for building highly reliable systems for computationally intensive applications. The PSSC Labs supercomputer will use a newly released twin blade form factor that creates higher computing density while using 30% less energy and can be easily maintained, upgraded, and recycled.

"We are honored and excited to provide the HPCC a world class super computer," said Janice Lesser, company President. "PSSC Labs builds, validates, and extensively tests all systems in a network environment to greatly increase reliability. We have documented a 0.001% in the field failure rate of our products. This allows our customers to focus their time on their work, and not expend resources on trouble-shooting computer component failures."

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For more details about PSSC Labs' high performance servers, supercharged workstations and industry leading clusters and clouds, visit us online at http://pssclabs.com.